Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun Proletarians collectively; a body of proletarians; the class of wage-workers dependent for support on daily or casual employment; the lowest and poorest class in the community.
  • Of or pertaining to the proletariate; relating to the proletarians; proletarian.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun The lower classes; beggars.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun Alternative spelling of proletariat.

Etymologies

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Examples

  • It is, briefly, to the growth of a huge 'proletariate' outside the church, and hostile to the state, that Southey attributes all social evils.

    The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) James Mill Leslie Stephen 1868

  • It is the right winged version of the Maxrist nonsense about proletariate freedom.

    An Astronomical Perspective on Climate Change | Universe Today 2009

  • American Political Tradition was an important work exposing the manipulation of history to present an agrarian frontier WASP land of opportunity self image to an urban immigrant multi ethnic proletariate population.

    Liberal at Columbia 2007

  • Janssen justly concludes: "It was the casting aside of those principles that caused the ruin of the working classes and the rise of the proletariate of later times."

    The Social Order Before and After the Protestant Reformation 2007

  • The rituals which cause tension so painfully quite deliberately separate-out the proletariate-the commune from the manipulators-if you deigned to pick up a history book- divide-and-conquer does make people feel inadequate.

    confetti 2006

  • Firstly, it has meant that, “[l] andless countrymen, whose ancestors were serfs, are the parents of the proletariate of great towns” (LPPO 229).

    Thomas Hill Green Tyler, Colin 2006

  • He was attracted to them because they were so different from the lumpen proletariate he had grown up with.

    THE EXTRA MAN JONATHAN AMES 1998

  • It was he who, in the phrase 'incorporation of the proletariate', summed up all those social reforms in which we are immersed, which aim at making every citizen a full member of his nation.

    Recent Developments in European Thought Various

  • Those are among the means by which such wars are won; and it cannot, I think, be denied that they are even now being employed to bring about the downfall of our system, to ensure the elimination of the middle class throughout the world so that ruthless dictators can control an otherwise leaderless proletariate.

    Do We Face Ideological Conquest 1946

  • I removed the leather costume of the victim, donned it, laced on his boots, which by good fortune were loose instead of tight, and, picking up his visored cap from the floor where it had fallen, stood forth to all seeming as genuine a member of the proletariate as ever wore goggles and held a wheel.

    The Firefly of France Marion Polk Angellotti 1936

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